


and smoke gets in your eyes

by irishais



Category: Final Fantasy VIII
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2021-03-01
Updated: 2021-03-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 01:22:23
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,275
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29768571
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/irishais/pseuds/irishais
Summary: It's so easy to quit, to leave Garden and all its ghosts behind. It's far, far harder to go back into the fray. Seifer/Xu, six years later.
Relationships: Seifer Almasy/Xu
Comments: 1
Kudos: 4





	and smoke gets in your eyes

She hated this bar. 

The jazz lounge was smoky, dark, single candles in dark hurricane glass jars around the edges of the tiny stage and on every table, generously-termed  _ atmosphere _ that Xu couldn’t stand. She hated this bar, she hated not being able to see in all the little shadows, hated not being able to read the stupid menu without the penlight she kept in her purse. 

Hated the pianist finishing his set on stage, some pretentious asshole with gelled back hair and a suit that was ostensibly vintage and fit him like a potato sack. She hated the wine in her glass, too, heady, rich, oaky, so dark it registered black until she tipped the glass toward the candle on her table and it glinted red. 

It looked too much like blood. She tipped the remainder of it down her throat, watching the stupid pianist in his stupid suit cajoling the last of a horribly sad song out of the piano-- grudgingly, she’d give him credit that he didn’t mangle it. Maybe it was time for a third refill. 

Maybe the whole bottle. 

“You wanna go home with him instead?” 

She hated this bar, she hated this town, she hated a lot of things today, and most of them came to bear on the man who dropped ungracefully in the chair across from her, flagging down a waiter to ask for a scotch, neat. Surprisingly civilized, from a guy who drank the worst beer in the known universe regularly, and gave every impression of  _ enjoying  _ it. 

He’d even put on a tie. 

Xu scowled, and gave into the urge for more wine. It was all going on her tab, anyway. “Maybe. How’d you find me?” 

He shrugged, reaching across the table to snag the mostly-empty pack of cigarettes sitting near her elbow, the candle casting the lower half of his face into sharp relief as Seifer leaned into light the smoke from it. Exhaling a plume toward the ceiling, he sat back. “It’s May third.” 

As if it were reason enough to hunt her down. And really, it was.

Xu turned the stem of her glass between her fingers; behind him, a trumpet player found a solemn, mournful note and descended the alphabet with it. The waiter returned with his scotch, her wine. She watched Seifer take a mouthful of his drink, and chase it with another long drag. The tip of the cigarette burned red, a pinprick of fire in the darkness. 

“You wanna talk about it this year? Or do I get to wait later, when you’re so drunk I have to pour you into a cab?” 

She huffed, taking up her new glass to drink deeply. The wine tasted less like nothing this time, more like the tannins backing all that oaken flavor. It was a marginal improvement, at least. 

“You could move out, you know.” 

He stubbed out his cigarette, and picked up the scotch, his smile a shadow in the candlelight. “Yeah, but I like my roommate. She’s hot.”    


A smile of her own curved up the edges of her mouth; she was grateful for the lousy lighting then, and the wine; it hid the reaction, kept it away, a small secret held just long enough to disappear. “Jerk.” 

“You love me.”    
  
“Sometimes.” 

He snorted, and reached across the table, covering her hand with his, broad fingers running rough and calloused across her darker, smoother skin. Xu turned her hand palm-up, lacing her fingers through his. May third. A woman stepped up to the microphone, her voice longing for something lost so long ago, honey-sweet, velvet-rich, mournful melancholy. 

God, she was too drunk for this, or not drunk enough, if she’d reached the waxing poetic stage of the night. 

May third. 

Her free hand tapped a cigarette out of the pack; Seifer called up the fire between his fingertips. She bent her head over it. Her lungs filled with smoke, with jazz, with the agony of living when her best friend was four years dead, a rotting corpse in a beautiful coffin, trapped under six feet of earth. 

She exhaled, and lost the bar for a moment in the haze. 

“You wanna get out of here?” Seifer asked, from somewhere very far away. 

“Yes.” 

\--

Deling City at night was maudlin, subdued in this neighborhood, streetlights casting shadows that might hold too many memories for Xu to want to walk through them unarmed, unprepared. She looped her arm around his waist, his coming around her shoulders instead, and kept to the brighter half of the sidewalk. 

“I got a lead,” he told her after a while, a few blocks further away from the melancholy of the bar. “One of Tilmitt’s contacts in Centra came through. Some cell working out of Esthar, supposed to be rogue SeeD or G. Army or some shit.”

“ _ That _ narrows it down.” 

“It’s better than the nothing we’ve been working on.” 

“Yeah, I guess. Think this intel will keep until morning?” She wasn’t in the right frame of mind to get back to  _ work _ , not tonight, not the one day a year Xu allowed herself to wallow. 

“Probably.” 

It was better than no promise at all-- Seifer knew better than to make ones he’d never be able to keep. 

So, they walked instead, through the streets, cutting across the space that ostensibly was a park, and looked more like a wonderland nightmare with too many topiaries that didn’t quite match the animals they were supposed to be. She let him stop her, kiss her to distract her from the thoughts that wanted to run too deep, somewhere in the middle of the fountain, a concrete and glass walk-through structure too elaborate to really justify calling it simply that. She was grateful for it, for the rushing of the water that drowned out the beating of her heart. 

“You okay?” he asked, drawing back only slightly, enough to rest his forehead against hers. 

Xu shook her head, fingers coming to graze the clean-shaven lines of his jaw, feeling the prickle of stubble there, a testament to the later hour. “I don’t want to talk about it yet. Maybe not at all.”    
  
“Okay,” he said. 

After four years, it was an understanding. One day, he’d stop asking entirely. 

She was drunk enough, three glasses of wine deep, that the shadows on either side of the stairs leading up to the door read as nothing more than blackness, an absence where the light didn’t reach, drunk and four years out of Garden and her reflexes not quite as razor sharp as they once were.

It was Seifer who moved abruptly from her side, while Xu was figuring out her keys, vaulting over the railing to grab at something that melted out of the dark, the knife stored in his pocket out and freed and at a slender throat. 

May third. 

She figured she’d eventually snap and start seeing ghosts; the hallucinations starting today were fitting. Xu’s keys fell from her suddenly-nerveless hand, clattering to the brick stoop as he brought his prey into the light, ripping back a sweatshirt hood to reveal cropped-short blonde hair and a face that she would know anywhere, in any life. 

A face that was supposed to be in an elaborate coffin, in a hole in the dirt. 

“--Quis..." The word refused to make it out of her mouth the entire way; she clapped her hand over it, as if she could swallow the last ten seconds, and pretend that none of this was happening. 

But wishing didn't turn back the clock, and Quistis Trepe tilted her head slightly, away from Seifer's knife. 

"Hi." 


End file.
